Aunt Charla is one of those people who take pride in not knowing about anything that’s changed in the world in the last thirty years. - Adrian Tchaikovsky

And wasn’t the planet supposed to die? Wasn’t that the deal about human-generated climate change? That the world was supposed to predecease us? I mean, that certainly seemed to be what we’d agree to. That, okay, we’d destroy everything, but that was fine just so long as the last thing to get destroyed was us. And here's all this. Flourishing. Fucking flourishing in the death zone. Heat-adapted in a way we could never be.

That project was already well underway when I first came to the Zone. Hidden in all the budgetary overspends and the trees. But I became a part of it. And as for Why? When a conglomerate of future-minded corporations gives you a bottomless well of untraceable funds and a team of top scientists with no scruples at all, it becomes all very, Because it’s there.

I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician.